


Beginnings

by Sissi459



Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:34:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27278056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sissi459/pseuds/Sissi459
Summary: Shelagh and Patrick reflect on their children growing up. Inspired by that scene in the montage at the beginning of S6E1 that features Patrick teaching Tim to shave.
Relationships: Bernadette | Shelagh Turner & Patrick Turner, Bernadette | Shelagh Turner & Timothy Turner, Bernadette | Shelagh Turner/Patrick Turner
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> The first time I saw that S6E1 opening montage, featuring Patrick teaching Tim to shave, it got me feeling some kinda sentimental way about our CtM kiddies growing up. I actually gasped and got choked up. Here, I explore those feelings through Shelagh’s eyes.

February-ish, 1962 (just before and during S6E1):

It was a joyous day when the Turners were all reunited after South Africa. Shelagh had slept soundly on the airplane, her head nestled into Patrick’s shoulder in a way that had worked asymmetrical horrors on her bouffant, until they landed in London. When they’d left four weeks before, Patrick had insisted on leaving the MG at their flat, so now they were compelled to take a cab home and drop off their bags before retrieving the children. Shelagh knew this was the sensible plan. They couldn’t have left the car outside Granny Parker’s for a month, and after all, they couldn’t possibly have crammed two children and four people’s luggage into the car. Still, she had been restive all the way to the flat, fretting about how long it would take for them to get the place in some semblance of order.

She needn’t have worried. Someone – undoubtedly one of the Nonnatuns – had stopped by the flat already and cracked open the windows, airing out the place. She and Patrick had only to deposit their luggage and depart one last time to head to Granny Parker’s.

“You don’t suppose they’ll have forgotten us?” Shelagh worried, as the London streets whirled by, feeling especially damp and grey after Africa.

“What, the children?” Patrick chuckled. “If Timothy can remember back issues of the Lancet and maths facts I never knew, then I should hope he can remember you.”

“Oh, I don’t mean Timothy,” Shelagh protested, though Patrick noticed she still caressed the picture of both children covertly in her hands.

“They will BOTH remember you,” he said, reaching one hand across to clasp her own as she held the portrait. “You’re their mother, and nothing about that will have changed.”

It was almost with the sense of a child approaching Christmas Day that Shelagh saw Granny Parker’s neat, starched lace curtains rolling into view, like bright and faultless lights in the prelude to dusk.

She was not the only one on watch.

Before Patrick could even park the car, Angela burst through the door, with Tim and Granny Parker close behind her.

“Mummy and Daddy!” she shouted.

Hurriedly, Shelagh struggled to roll down the window, which stuck after weeks of disuse.

“Helloo, my darling! Hello, Angela! Hello, Tim!” she cried out.

“Hello, children!” Patrick hollered loudly from his side of the car, waving and swerving precariously, all at once.

Angela kept jumping up and down and shouting, and Granny Parker and Tim barely held her back as the car rolled to a hurried stop.

“It’s Mummy and Daddy! Mummy and Daddy are here!”

And then Mummy and Dad had lept out of the car themselves, and something very like a sports field pile-on occurred as all the Turners – and Granny Parker – tried to hug each other at once.

Patrick hoisted up a grinning Angela into his arms, as Tim turned to Shelagh.

“Mum!” he smiled happily, and hugged her soundly around the shoulders.

“My goodness, have you grown since we left?” she asked, holding her son’s shoulders as she appraised him from top to toe.

Tim chortled. “I don’t know, mum – I have been really tired.”

She smoothed his hair back from his face as he grinned, and, with shock, Shelagh suddenly caught sight of a strange shadow lingering about his upper lip. Was that…? No – it had to be dirt, or a strange trick of the gathering evening. It was just impossible. They hadn’t been in South Africa that long.

In a heartbeat, all was forgotten, as Angela climbed from her father’s arms to her mother’s to plant a kiss on her cheek, and of course Granny Parker had to be greeted and thanked. Anticipating their late arrival and road-weary state, she had made up a full, old-fashioned supper to feed all of them. As the dank afternoon lengthened into a misty, cold evening, all four Turners gathered around her table with glee.

There was so much to be shared – Angela had scraped her knee recently, and made friends with the little girl down the street some weeks ago, and she had made her dolly a book all about Africa – would they like to see the illustrations? Tim protested that half the animals she’d drawn didn’t even live in Africa, if they existed at all – and anyway, he’d won a cricket match that went on for three days, and he’d outscored Percy on the science exam three times in a row, which meant he, instead of Percy, was now the best science student going at the grammar school.

As for Shelagh and Patrick, the stories were almost too numerous to mention. Yes, yes – they’d seen zebras. And elephants! And there was the tale of Fred and Tom re-laying all the pipes to the clinic, and the two nice little boys they’d met, Matthias and his brother Abel. Tim wanted to know all about the airplane, and Angela wanted to know if the little girls in South Africa had dollies like hers, and all was in a general way merriment and chaos and delight.

The car on the way home was raucous. Angela couldn’t sit still at all, and ended up sharing the front bench seat with her parents, where she promptly fell asleep between them. Tim let Shelagh know that he’d be needing more socks again. She let him know that he’d have to raise that particular concern on a day when they hadn’t just come back from international travel.

With the constant whirl of family activity having returned full-tilt, it wasn’t until the four of them sat down for tea a few days later that Shelagh once again got a good look at her son. What she saw in the clear and certain light by the kitchen hatch made her heart jump into her throat oddly—and not just because her stomach had been upset for a fortnight now. It was faint, but it was definitely there: a fringe of baby-fine dark hair on her son’s upper lip. Her son! With the nascent beginnings of a mustache! Something about it made her heart – or was that her stomach? – twist. Surely it wasn’t possible. She wasn’t that old. _He_ wasn’t that old!

But several different vantage points throughout the night proved to her that the same dark shadow now showed up in any light. Good gracious, she was going to have to ask Patrick to teach him how to shave!

After the dishes were put away, she slipped out to join her husband, who had retreated to the garden with a cup of tea. (She had refused one. Her lingering Capetown tummy couldn’t accept the thought of dairy products just now.) He smiled as she approached – it never failed to warm her heart. And she could rather use warming, she reflected.

“I must say, one misses the colonial climate more than expected,” she said as she sat down in the chair nearest his, and surreptitiously slipped a biscuit off his saucer.

“It was rather nice to sit outside in the sunlight in January,” he said, pretending not to notice she was munching his biscuit.

“We were gone a rather long time,” she said. “I still feel as if the children grew overnight.”

“Tim probably did,” Patrick replied, electing to dunk his remaining biscuit and hold onto it before it, too, went missing. “And to think I once worried polio might stunt his growth!”

Shelagh giggled a little, and tried to enjoy the brisk night air, but something was still bothering her.

“Patrick?” she started.

“Mmm?” he queried, through a mouth full of biscuit.

“I don’t know when is usual for this sort of thing – you know I didn’t have brothers. But I was thinking it might be time for you to teach the boy to –” she swallowed – “to shave.”

She steadied her eyes on a potted plant in the corner, barely visible in the gloaming.

Patrick set down his teacup, and drew a deep breath. “I was wondering if you’d noticed that,” he said, slowly. “I think I was about his age when I started. Maybe a little older.”

“Is that normal?” Suddenly her eyes turned to face her husband’s again, looking large and startled. “Patrick, he’s only turning fifteen this year!”

He chuckled, and once again folded his hands over hers on the table.

“It’ll be a long while yet before he’s shaving anything more than peach fuzz. But with dark whiskers, it does show up rather clearly. I think I was 15 when my father first taught me to shave – with an old-fashioned cut-throat razor!”

“Really?” she said, a brief moment of levity lighting her smile.

“He was an old-fashioned man,” Patrick shrugged. “Of course, it was years more before I had any real beard to speak of. But one can’t go to grammar school looking like he’s trying to be Errol Flynn.”

Shelagh giggled again, at the reference to a movie star she remembered from her own childhood. “Noo, I suppose not,” she conceded, her pretty voice lingering on the long “o.”

“I’ll head down to the barber’s on Monday. Buy him his own shaving kit. Safety razor, this time,” he joked, “and then we’ll have a little lesson on shaving that mustache.”

But Shelagh’s face told him that she suddenly wasn’t in a joking mood again.

“What is it, my love?” he whispered, squeezing her hands.

“How is _our son_ old enough to have anything like a mustache?” There was an edge of something in her voice – not just wonder, but also something tense and worried.

“I wonder that myself,” he answered.

“Ohhh, Patrick – it just makes me feel so _old_!” she moaned, smiling ruefully even as something in her heart ached.

“YOU feel old?” Patrick said, but his usually jocular tone when he spoke of the gap in their ages sounded more like sympathy this time.

“Yes,” Shelagh continued. “Just the other day, I had a little boy. I patched his Cub Scout uniform and tucked him into bed at night with Cuthbert. How can he possibly be a young man in need of a shave?”

Patrick wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close.

“I don’t know,” he said, rocking with her gently. Then he smiled a little. “Time,” he said, wryly.

But she wasn’t to be so comforted.

“Patrick, I only had such a short time with him as a little boy! I didn’t realize it at the time, but now it feels like he was mostly grown when we married.”

Patrick sighed, and stroked his hand up and down her arm.

“In some ways,” he said slowly, “I think I’ve felt that ever since he came out of that ghastly iron lung, wanting Brylcreem. I’d meant to get it for him as a small thing – a treat for the wedding day. But when he came out, he was…older. Old enough for much more than Brylcreem.”

He sighed again, more softly, but his wife’s eyes were trained on his face, missing nothing.

“You’ve never told me that before,” she murmured.

He cocked half a smile – the kind of smile that didn’t reach his grey eyes. She stroked his hair, her hand coming to rest on his cheek.

They sat still for a few minutes, sharing the same reflection silently.

“I wish they were our babies for longer,” she sighed.

He said nothing, but he didn’t have to. A few stars began to wink out of the sky, and the wind pressed cold through Shelagh’s cardigan.

Suddenly, Patrick cracked a real smile.

“At any rate,” he said, “You’ve got years before Angela needs whatever the equivalent marker of girls growing up is.”

“Brassieres,” Shelagh said, slightly naughtily. “Now come to bed.”

**Author's Note:**

> When I reviewed the full episode within which I imagine this scene takes place, I realized that it ends on…Shelagh having another baby to raise, after all. Which just proves the Heidi Thomas genius of starting the episode with a slightly heart-wrenching moment where we all realize “OMG, how is Tim not a little kid anymore?”


End file.
